Delay discounting of hypothetical and real money: the effect of holding reinforcement rate constant.

We examined the effect of holding reinforcement rate constant on delay discounting of hypothetical and real money when delays were actually experienced. In some conditions, participants were required to wait for the delayed rewards, and in some conditions, reinforcement rate was held constant by adding blackout periods after immediate rewards. Typical discounting occurred with the standard procedure and when there were no blackouts, but not when we held rate of reinforcement constant. Real and hypothetical money produced the same outcomes.

Creating single-subject design graphs in Microsoft Excel 2007.

Over 10 years have passed since the publication of Carr and Burkholder's (1998) technical article on how to construct single-subject graphs using Microsoft Excel. Over the course of the past decade, the Excel program has undergone a series of revisions that make the Carr and Burkholder paper somewhat difficult to follow with newer versions. The present article provides task analyses for constructing various types of commonly used single-subject design graphs in Microsoft Excel 2007. The task analyses were evaluated using a between-subjects design that compared the graphing skills of 22 behavior-analytic graduate students using Excel 2007 and either the Carr and Burkholder or newly developed task analyses. Results indicate that the new task analyses yielded more accurate and faster graph construction than the Carr and Burkholder instructions.